Once you have created a website for your business, you need to understand that you've only just began. There is more to websites after creating it – you will be required to make it rank higher within the search engines. Otherwise, it will be needless having a website because internet users (some of whom are your potential customers) won't be able to visit your site.

Now, there are a number of reasons as to why SEO services are important to any kind of business. For example, with quality SEO services you will be able to stay on of the search results top once you are highly ranked within search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. This will generate more traffic to your website, which will in turn generate leads and profits for your business.

The other reason to consider investing in SEO services is the chance to explore new things. This simply means that your business will be able to attract new breed of customers, most of whom you wouldn't have tapped without SEO services. For instance, if you own a shopping boutique and have ecommerce capabilities on your website (for online sales,) you could invest in ecommerce SEO services to get search exposure and new traffic to your site and generate online sales, beyond the traffic that walks through the door. Certain SEO companies, like Click Centric SEO and TOFU Marketing, offer services specific to ecommerce SEO and social media marketing.

So, as a business, how can you find quality SEO services amidst the global marketplace?

There are a number of factors to look for in SEO companies. Let's take a look at the 3 most important characteristics of such SEO companies.

Responsiveness

You should know that SEO isn't a one-time contract. No, it involves a lot of things (backlinking, on-page SEO, HTML optimization, off-page SEO, social media, and brand building) that have to be maintained and continuously monitored. Therefore, when looking for the best SEO services, the company should be very responsive. This is an extremely vital factor such that when something goes wrong (with the website) the company should readily be available.

Up to Date

One thing with SEO is the fact that it keeps on changing. That is, search engines such as Google keep on updating the way they rank websites. For instance, Google's latest update was in April 2013 where Google Penguin Update came with new changes. The right SEO company should be up to date with such kind of changes. Just a tip: as a customer, it is also advisable that you are well accustomed of such changes too. A great company will inform you appropriately!

Expertise and Skills

This is the most essential aspect of all when seeking SEO services, especially for ecommerce. Before picking the right SEO company, it is imperative that you choose a firm with the right expertise and skills. The company is supposed to have a team that possesses the right dexterity to handle all SEO requirements. Since SEO services involve quite a lot of things, the best SEO company needs to be All-rounded. That is, don't go for a company which is specialized only in a certain area and lags in other areas.

You should instead settle for a company that posses all kinds of SEO skills. For example, a company is required to Understand Technical SEO tactics like great content writing and good HTML Optimization for the best SEO-friendly website. As one of their tactics, the SEO company has to understand and respect the importance of social media and online branding.

Content marketing is one of the most popular internet marketing techniques to inbound quality traffic to your website. Content marketing allows your business to make the most out of every opportunity to interact with potential customers.

Content marketing is based on a principle that offers multiple ways to bring out your ideas. In other words, you can create great content in different forms (such as article, video or infographic) and market it in different ways (via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or StumbleUpon).

The best part about this online marketing technique is that it creates a level playing field for any company to boost its web presence, be it a small business or a large business. According to a research by Kapost, a reputable marketing software provider, content marketing techniques (like per dollar) can deliver three times the lead of traditional online marketing techniques (like paid search).

This makes content marketing the ideal option when it comes to marketing your business. Content marketing comes with a lot of benefits but the most notable ones are building brand awareness, driving inbound traffic and generating natural links. Below we go into more detail about these business benefits of content marketing.

Create Brand Awareness

The aim of every content marketing effort on the web is creating brand awareness. The best way for your brand to earn more respect and build a strong relationship with customers is to ensure the audience is engaged. This means that you should create quality, relevant and creative content that reflects the image of the business and connects well with your target audience.

Visually-based content, such as videos, comics, cartoons, infographics and images, has proven to be effective in engaging with the audience as it attracts an incredibly huge audience. If such content incorporates search engine optimization, their marketing potential will dramatically increase.

Driving Inbound Traffic

Content marketing offers a great way to promote a product or business. If you create great content with irresistible calls to action, people who read or view your content will most likely visit your website. This is a unique traffic as it is based on how well your content appeals to users. If you want to drive quality inbound traffic to your website, simply focus on informing and educating your target audience by addressing relevant topics, questions, concerns and issues. For instance, a plumber can create an article about the most common plumbing problems in homes.' This will drive traffic to the plumber's site as people would want to deal with the problems. Additionally, it will help optimize the plumber's overall web presence marketing.

Generating Link Popularity

Any content that goes viral is usually abuzz on social media. A popular content will attract a lot of links, making it have a considerable authority on the internet. SEO is based on the concept that an authority webpage will generate powerful outbound links. Most content marketing efforts use this effective SEO concept, commonly known as "link bait".

You can use your content as SEO link bait. All you have to do is create a great content, whether article, graphic or video, and then include a link to your site. If your content creates a buzz and many internet users link to it, your content's SEO value will become more powerful.

WordPress has become the most popular content management system and web publishing platform for implementing a website. Webmasters and website designers appreciate WordPress’ versatility in adapting a wide range of changes, while users appreciate its efficiency and simplicity.

You do not need much website design, HTML and coding knowledge in order to build a website or blog on WordPress. However, as for any other website, one built on WordPress platform needs some SEO love in order to increase its organic traffic. Only increased website visitors can lead to success, business growth, and profitability for online-based business.

Do not make the mistake to believe that WordPress websites are already optimized for search engines out of the box. It is true that WordPress platform is search engine friendly, but for best results you’ll still need to apply some good SEO techniques. For this reason, below we address here some SEO tips for advanced WordPress.

#1: Install a Good WordPress SEO Plugin

There are two plugins for WordPress SEO that are most popular: WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack. You can choose any of them for your website. You may also need additional plugins for your analytics tracking code. However, you will still need to optimize your blog or website for SEO because the plugin is not a turnkey solution. SEO is an ongoing and continuous process. First step is to configure your WordPress SEO plugin correctly.

Take care of any modifications that the new plugin can make to your website’s code. Optimize your blog or website content for some specific keywords based on your SEO research and analysis. This will help you attract new prospective customers, engage them and convert them into buyers.

#2: Choose a Solid WordPress Hosting Solution

Your choice should be based on several factors, such as ease of installation, cost, and web server management. A virtual private server solution is recommended, if you can afford the time and resources to deal with backing up data and restoring the site, upgrades, and hosting costs.

In case that you cannot afford a VPS choose at least a managed WordPress hosting solution that will handle your administration, security, technical, and performance issues for a modest fee. In choosing your web hosting provider take into consideration some factors such as support for plugins, backup and restore, staging environment, web hosting provider reputation and expertise.

#3: Avoid Certain Design Themes

Choose carefully your free WordPress themes, since some of them may affect your SEO. Consider the following aspects when chooing SEO-friendly WordPress themes: no spammy links, support ensured for future theme’s updates, review of other users, the them should follow the best SEO practices and Google’s Guidelines, and mobile friendly.

#4: Install Your WordPress Website Mindfully

The options include a subdomain, new domain, or a subfolder. In case that you already have a business website and want to create a new blog, installing WordPress on a subdomain a better choice than installing on a new domain. On a subdomain will be easier to implement your SEO strategy. An even better solution for SEO is to host your new blog on a subfolder.

#5: Ditch Auto-H1 WordPress Themes

Do not choose a WordPress theme that uses multiple instances of H1 tags per page. That can affect your SEO because multiple H1 tags can be seen as spammy and therefore harm your organic search rankings. The best SEO practice is to use H1 just for your first heading.

We hope that our practical WordPress SEO tips will help you in achieving better ranking results with your website or blog.

As an ecommerce business owner or marketer, PPC ads are one of the many marketing tactics you can employ to draw in new customers (and make repeat customers of those who currently shop with you.) But, why should you integrate the ever-sensitive Google Display Network (GDN) as a part of your PPC ad marketing?

These are a few ways ecommerce sites can benefit from the GDN as an efficient traffic generation tool. So below we share a few insights as to why e-retailers should embrace the GDN in an effort to see a greater return on investment they are making with paid advertising mediums.

Lower Cost Per Click. Better Traffic

With GDN, while clicks may only range from the $2 up to $12 range, this is in comparison to nearly $100 ads used by certain industry leaders trying to get the most per click on an ad. With a good mix or remarketed campaigns as well as general GDN campaigns, these ads will help lead to the targeted traffic your business is looking for, at a more affordable rate than competitor PPC ads.

Non-compete Ad Needs Are Filled by the GDN

Distributors, resellers, and similar industries which use ecommerce PPC advertising services, might have non compete clauses in their contracts; here is where GDN ads can work marvelously. Since you are limited by keywords which can't be used in these industries, GDN based paid ads will help draw in the targeted traffic you aren't getting from certain keyword based searches.

No infringement on non-compete clauses, plus targeted traffic via PPC ads, means your business will still benefit from targeted traffic in your niche.

Quality Is Less A Concern

Low quality scores are something we deal with occasionally, even with high quality ads being put out. One such example is having to sacrifice quality, in order to meet a deadline when putting out an ad.

Turning to GDN ads, you won't see the lag in traffic to your site, simply because of a low quality score elsewhere. With highly targeted GDN ads, not only do they provide specific targeted content for your audience, but help bolster your online marketing efforts as well.

Easy to Measure Effectiveness & ROI

Just like managing keyword search and SEO history, you have to measure the GDN ad placement as well. Look for the clicks for certain ads, in order to determine which ones are working and which ones aren't, in order to remove those which are counter intuitive to your efforts.

Targeting your niche with ads is something you should experiment with as well. Using complementary ads through GDN, in addition to search engine campaigns, will help improve your online visibility, and help bolster the targeted traffic you are receiving on your site as well.

Google Display Network ads can prove extremely beneficial as a part of your paid marketing efforts as a business owner. Even when search engine marketing is going well, and PPC ads are working elsewhere, leveraging your site with targeted GDN ads, can truly help bolster your online presence. And, if quality is lacking elsewhere, or if you are overpaying for ads elsewhere, the low cost of GDN ads can help balance your overall costs, and help create a balanced marketing campaign online as well.

While SEO is focal to increasing the search visibility of a website or webpage in organic search engine results, content marketing is completely different approach that has similar aspirations. Content marketing refers to any kind of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content with the aim of attaining and retaining customers.

The two, if merged in an appropriate manner, can bring the ultimate success in inbound marketing. To reach the point of success, you have to look beyond general views of SEO being just about traffic, revenue and conversations. Sufficient evidence from case studies has proven that content planning and content promotion is key to successful marketing. Put in other words, merging SEO to an effective content marketing strategy will ultimately lead to high rankings in search results and consequently building a powerful brand.

Key Elements of an SEO-infused Content Marketing Strategy

When integrating SEO and content marketing, there are four elements that when used, will work to ensure the much sought success in marketing. Top on the list is finding what people want and giving it to them. The other elements include using display ads and retargeting lists to communicate with customers, making special price offers on your product and lastly, evolving a smart content marketing plan to develop content that pulls in your target.

When carried out in the correct manner, content marketing becomes one of the best ways of building relationship with customers. Good relationship with customers leads to the establishment of trust and authority in the given market while positioning the company right in the middle of the buying and research cycle. Being at this position, the company may take control of what they see, think read and do.

How SEOs Fail With Content Marketing

A lot of effort has been put into merging of SEO with content marketing but in most of the cases, the marketing ends up failing all together. Reasons for the fails may be attributed to the methodologies used, some of which are based on pure misconceptions. First and foremost, is important to take note that content marketing is not paid content being disguised as editorial content.

The second mistake that is even more costly, is giving the customers the impression that one is selling or marketing. Content should be geared to creating value for customers, meeting their needs and helping them as opposed to being focused on just selling. By gearing content to be more customer focused, you will eventually give a wider reach and impact as more people out there will find your content.

SEO + Content Marketing = Brand Building

To build your brand and make it a market leader through content marketing, you need to be the most appealing in your market area. This may be achieved using SEO analysis and keyword research done by an experienced consultant to get to know the search users’ needs, intent and questions. Before even going to invest in content marketing, get to know what your customer wants, their interests, desires and problems.

The list of challenges and shortcomings that hinder companies in the merging of content marketing and SEO tactics are generally common and recurring. Some of the content marketing challenges include, weak content planning, failing to integrate content marketing into digital channels and lack of knowledge of digital marketing. To avoid most of the challenges, planning and research should be done seriously. One should also ensure that the created content takes you closer to the business goals.

In conclusion, the merging of SEO tactics with content marketing generates better outcomes where experts work together. It is also quite important to write original and interesting content that is customer focused. Finally, although the merging of SEO with content marketing is not a walk in the park, its returns are numerous and worth it.

The Internet has become a boiling pot for content and there are many ways for you to leverage the content you create in your website. Through the use of engaging copy, rich snippets, link bait, and creative images, let's see the top 10 places that will help make a tsunami of web traffic flood to your site.

Pinterest

You can build traffic easily with a free account at Pinterest. You can post relevant and attractive pictures to your industry and make possible readers come to you. Pinterest is very intuitive and you can post pictures which will entice users that seek your products or your type of content to click through to your website.

Visual.ly

This service allows companies and websites to create infographics which offer an amazing visual appeal. Visual.ly make these shareable across the web and cause visitors to become interested in knowing who the creator of a particular infographic was. This is where your chance for extra traffic comes in.

Blog Engage

Blog Engage site allows you to share your content through blog posts. Simply select a category of interest, and post it so that it is found by your target audience.

SlideShare

This is an amazing service which you can use PowerPoint or any other slideshow presentation software to turn your content into live presentations. You can either include all of your content in them or just some very interesting parts in order to make users click through to your website or product page. The best of all is that creating an account on SlideShare is free.

Instagram

This social site was already a powerhouse even before Facebook bought, now imagine after that. Just like Pinterest, Instagram users are able to share amazing pictures of anything they like. They also offer an image editing software that's top of the industry. You can cause your users to click through amazing pictures you post, they can comment on them, re-share them and most especially, click through to your website.

StumbleUpon

This is another social network, where you can create a free account to share your content. Leverage your site's presence by increasing the number of followers, sharing content and having it re-shared and much more. StumbleUpon is a powerful social network to boost your Internet traffic.

LinkedIn Groups

Within the LinkedIn social networks, it is possible to leverage your internal connections through the use of groups. Website owners share content that is relevant to their niche and see how their user base engages the content and clicks through to their website. LinkedIn Groups is an amazing way to create free content to your website.

Triberr

Triberr is another place for you to increase your social presence. You can quickly have your content shared by many bloggers and people that like it on Triberr.

Reddit

This site is free to use and functions more like a newsfeed type of site. Share content on Reddit that is relevant to news topics and find a way to link to your main topic or niche.

Google+ Communities

For all those that remember what it was to have a group at Orkut, and for all major Facebook Page and Communities users, Google+ Communities is another similar product which packs a strong punch. Easily share your content, have it re-shared, commented and bring a lot of traffic into your website.

These are the top 10 sites we have found and that we hope you can use to hone your online presence, bring in a lot of free traffic and increase your website's power.